This is the blog of Eco-Vista | Brent Stephenson, a wildlife photographer, guide, and birder based near Napier, New Zealand. His wildlife, landscape, and people images can be discovered at his portfolio website.

Saturday, 13 August 2011

Captioning images...fun oh fun!

Well been a mostly restful few days here at Mum and Dad's, although I can never sit around for too long, and there is always work to be done! The images from the last cruise have been captioned and burnt to DVD and should be winging their way to the Zegrahm Expeditions office as I write this. However, I now have another 1012 images that have been selected for submission to stock libraries, and so working through those captioning them all and making sure they are keyworded appropriately, etc. It'll take a while!

However, it is nice to look back through images and remember the places and times they were taken. I have therefore been reminded of the great trip I did out to Tiritiri Matangi Island last September, with mates John Ewen, Kevin Parker, Doug Armstrong and others. Got some great photos, with a bunch of them having been selected. However, this sequence below is probably one of the strangest sequences shot during this trip. I was perched in a small tree for hours photographing a North Island robin nest, and in fact did so on two occasions, but towards the end of the second stint something really bizarre happened. A female stitchbird approached the nest, peered into it at the chicks in the nest, and then appeared to feed the begging chicks. This is the first record of something like this ever happening with these two species, and is made even more bizarre by the fact they are completely unrelated, feed on very different foods (although may share some invertebrate prey species sometimes), and stitchbird nest in cavities! All a little strange, but glad I was there to capture it.

I will be trying to get some other photos from the last few months up on here over the next week as well.

The real parent feeding the chicks

The real parent at the nest, note the large spider abdomen sticking out of the chicks mouth

Goodness only knows Hamish. Guess the stimulus of seeing begging chicks was too great. In the several hours (probably 3) I was watching the nest this was the only occurrence. So I suspect she happened upon it whilst going about her normal business, and was somehow stimulated to offer food. Whatever the reason, pretty cool behaviour and glad the photos do it justice!Thanks,Brent